Centre for Internet and Society

The Pervert in the Cubicle: Of Pornographers, Pirates and Terrorists: A Talk by Nishant Shah

praskrishna — 2013-08-28T10:10:34Z

Dr. Nishant Shah was a speaker at the 2013 Annenberg - Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute organized by Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and the Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford from June 24 to July 5, 2013 at the University of Oxford.

Click to read the schedule published by the University of Oxford

The Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and the Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford (PCMLP) are pleased to invite applications to the 15th annual Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute, to be held from Monday, June 24 to Friday, July 5, 2013 at the University of Oxford.

For the past fifteen years, the Annenberg- Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute has brought together researchers, academics, and practitioners for two weeks of scholarship on a range of media issues. A partnership between the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania and the Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford, the program brings together a diverse range of participants from across the world.

The annual summer institute brings together young scholars and regulators for two weeks to discuss important recent trends in technology, international politics and development and its influence on media policy. Participants come from around the world; countries represented at previous summer institutes include Myanmar, Bosnia and Herzegonia, Iran, Kenya, China, Brazil, Egypt, Nigeria, Jordan, Italy, Iran, Colombia, El Salvador, among others.

This year the summer institute seeks, as part of the cohort, researchers and academics (PhD candidates and early career academics, for example), who will come with a research project related to the general subject of the seminar. We welcome applications from emerging scholars and practitioners working on topics such as media and democracy, public service broadcasting, Internet policy and politics, monitoring and evaluation of media development programs, the media’s role in conflict and post-conflict environments, strategic communications, as well as other topics. For full application instructions please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page . The application is available here. Please note, applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until April 1, 2013.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/annenberg-oxford-media-policy-summer-institute

The perils of not protecting intellectual property for new ventures

praskrishna — 2015-03-20T13:55:55Z

Soothe Healthcare's big dilemma ahead of the launch of its affordable sanitary napkin was whether or not to patent the technology and design.

The article by Evelyn Fok and Shonali Advani was published in the Economic Times on March 20, 2015. Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.

"At this point, it's not worth the risk-reward," said Sahil Dharia, managing director of the two-year-old startup. "It's an acceptable loss." The startup world has two kinds of entrepreneurs: those who patent their ideas, and those who don't.

Dharia falls in the latter category, and with good reason. He would rather Soothe use its capital to build the brand, Paree, than to fight lawsuits over infringements. In the first group are a small number of hardware product startups following strong intellectual property traditions established abroad, both for legal protection and to be taken seriously by investors.

As a long-term business strategy, protecting a company's intellectual assets has its advantages. For instance, a patent would allow a startup to expand to new geographies quicker by entering into licensing agreements with other firms. But given that acquiring and protecting an intellectual property right is tedious and expensive, it is not an easy decision for startups.

"There is definitely a risk when these businesses accumulate market or technology, when they have huge revenues and are sitting on cash reserves. Competition will use every possible lever against them," said Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bengaluru-based research organization Centre for Internet and Society.

As a startup matures in terms of size and scale, the importance of intellectual property becomes evident, particularly when raising funds. "Having an IP portfolio is valuable if the company is being acquired by a larger company that can leverage and protect the IP," said Sandeep Singhal, co-founder and managing director of Nexus Venture Partners. Nexus has backed product startups such as solar firm d.light and enterprise solutions company Druva, which has registered patents abroad. "While valuation is not determined by IP, we look at a business plan that has proven differentiated IP than without," Singhal said.

"It is like a double-edged sword. Patenting is very expensive, but if somebody else is doing something similar and they patent it, you could be out of business," said Abhishek Latthe, founder of two-year-old Internet of Things company SenseGiz, which filed for two patents last year on product and algorithmic design. The company has sold 20,000 units of its first product, a bluetooth tracking tag, and is in talks to raise capital.

Patent litigation in India is still at a nascent stage, bogged by inefficient and inconsistent courts. "A lot of out-of-court settlements happen, and the compensation that courts are awarding for IPR infringements are still not very high - Rs15 lakh is one of the highest I've seen," said Abhishek Pandurangi, partner at Mumbai-based law firm Khurana & Khurana, which advises startups on IPR.

Taking the longer view, Indian startups -especially those focusing on the US market that is awash with non-practicing entities or so-called "patent trolls" - have taken steps to license their intellectual property, often in focus markets with strong IP regimes such as the United States, Singapore and Europe. Software startups, the bulk of India's startup ecosystem, are divided on the issue. Given the rapid innovation cycle that renders most new technology irrelevant in six months, any effort channeled into protecting intellectual property seems futile.

Besides, many budding startups cannot afford to file a patent. Taking into account attorney and agent costs, registering a patent could cost up to Rs 5 lakh in India and Rs 10 lakh in the United States. The effort can take up to 9 years, or, given that patent decisions highly depend on local policy, "go down the drain," as one IP researcher put it. According to the Indian Patents Act, 1970, mathematical methods, computer programmes and algorithms fall under the category of "Inventions not Patentable," meaning that software innovations cannot be patented in India.

For many entrepreneurs in India, intellectual property is not core to their company's value or business model. They prefer instead to focus on priorities that pay off in the short term - acquiring customers, developing products and raising funds. "There is no reason to patent sometimes," said Jayesh Badani, founder and chief executive of innovator marketplace Ideaken.

The Centre for Internet and Society found that of 93 mobile app developers in India who were surveyed for a study last year, only 20% had acquired patents to protect their products, and 26% were concerned about their work being infringed. Patent grants to Indian applicants grew 45% between 2002 and 2013, compared with 300% for foreign inventions, show data available from the Controller General of Patents, Designs, and Trademarks.

Consider the case of Jaydeep Mandal, a 29-year-old inventor who won a national invention award while an engineering student in Calcutta, which paid for him to patent his technology. Today, he is a managing director at four-year-old Aakar Innovations, which spent a year-and-half developing a machine that produces compostable menstrual hygiene products. The company has filed patents in India, Bangladesh and Cambodia.

"I learnt the importance of IPR from day one so I'm concerned, but many entrepreneurs would not know how important it is. That's how many individual innovators lose out," Mandal said. Dharia of Soothe Healthcare has a different take on this. "If I had lots of money I would patent," he said. "But I believe in free markets - people will copy design and that is how the market raises its standards, and it forces me to innovate again."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/economic-times-evelyn-fok-shonali-advani-march-20-2015-the-perils-of-not-protecting-intellectual-property-for-new-ventures

The Perils and Prospects of Bringing the Next Billion Online

praskrishna — 2015-08-23T08:04:01Z

Sunil Abraham is the executive director of the Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore. In his PDF talk, he explains the fight for net neutrality in India and how many solutions fall under the category of walled garden.

Video

For more see Personal Democracy Media

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/perils-and-prospects-of-bringing-next-billion-online

The Partnership on AI has Intel, SalesForce, Ebay and others as its newest members

praskrishna — 2017-05-19T05:36:30Z

A slew of industry heavyweights have decided to augment the ranks of the Partnership on AI. New joiners to the group, which includes companies and non-profits, include names like Intel, Salesforce, eBay, Sony, SAP, McKinsey & Company, Zalando and Cogitai.

The blog post by Mudit Mohilay was published in the Tech Portal on May 16, 2017.

The group also announced a slew of non-profit partners including the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the AI Forum of New Zealand, the Centre for Democracy & Technology, the Centre for Internet and Society (India), Data & Society Research Institute, the Digital Asia Hub, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Future of Privacy Forum, the Human Rights Watch, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, UNICEF, Upturn, and the XPRIZE Foundation.

The new members are a late addition to a group which already consists of many of their industry peers including Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Apple. The companies will be sharing the platform with several non-profit organizations and the overall aim will be promoting best practices while using AI and discussing the benefits and the dangers associated with the same. Considering the rapid race at which AI is encroaching in our daily lives, this is a highly relevant platform.

The platform will also be hosting a whole bunch of AI Grand Challenges with the aim of providing financial and motivational incentives to researchers working with AI. The group will also be working with researchers who are studying the effects of AI on the human social structure. A best paper award for the greatest contribution to “AI, People, and Society,” has already been announced and is open.

The group will also be working on establishing a series of groups that are topic or sector specific. These groups will be working to generate best practices for various niches. The aim here is to build a community that can deal and even forestall the problem which may arise as Artificial Intelligence is inducted into our society at a deeper level.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-tech-portal-may-16-2017-mudit-mohilay-partnership-on-ai-intel-sales-force-ebay-and-others-as-its-newest-members

The Panama Papers and the question of privacy

praskrishna — 2016-04-24T14:03:35Z

This statement was originally published on privacyinternational.org on 4 April 2016.

Read the entry by Claire Lauterbach published in Big News Network on April 6, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

We do agree with Ramon Fonseca about one thing: that "Each person has a right to privacy, whether they are a king or a beggar."

But that's where our commonality with co-founder of disgraced Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca ends.

Last year, a whistleblower leaked 11.5 million documents about the firm's business brokering offshore companies, details of which were published yesterday. Reportedly the largest leak in journalistic history, the cache reveals hidden assets by a dozen current and former world leaders, and scores of celebrities and tycoons, some of which are linked to high level corruption scandals.

This scandal isn't about privacy, though. If anything, it's about the need for transparency about how the powerful wield their power. We need transparency - and good solid investigation - to understand where and how our right to privacy is eroded.

Privacy and transparency are not opposites. They are two sides of the same coin. As privacy advocates, we use transparency capabilities to investigate surveillance. Meanwhile, privacy as a right requires transparency from the institutions that gather and use our data.

Privacy International, like other human rights groups, conducts investigations in the public interest. That allows us to understand, for example, how Colombia built a shadow surveillance system despite evidence of illegal interceptions, or how UK police appear to be collecting private communications data at protests, according to a Vice News investigation.

Many of the Panama Papers' revelations are in the public interest insofar as they concern the transformation of public assets - like taxpayers' money and state funds - into private gains, and allow the powerful to avoid scrutiny. Privacy and transparency are not opposites. They are two sides of the same coin.

Fonseca called journalism around the leaked files an "international campaign against privacy".

But what Fonseca is really doing is advocating a status quo of 'privacy for the kings, and transparency for the beggars'. Or rather, privacy for the business moguls, politicians, corporations and government agencies, and transparency for the citizens, consumers, activists and journalists.

For the public, our financial systems are now surveiled by design. Our transactions are labelled as suspicious and sent for mining by intelligence agencies. We need IDs to open accounts, and our records are profiled by credit agencies who facilitate key decisions about us and our families. Secretive institutions collate this information to decide whether or not we are terrorists. While a certain degree of this is necessary for public order, what's clear is that we are watched while the 'kings' are able to circumvent many of these measures and escape scrutiny. We should never make the mistake of conflating the right to privacy for the individual with the desire to hide shadowy, ethically dubious, borderline-or-actual illegal activity for the immensely wealthy and powerful.

The real issues around privacy include: the spreading of draconian laws, from the UK, to Pakistan, to Kenya, that sanction warrantless surveillance and online monitoring, with insufficient protection for the public. It's the intrusive biometric registration of some of the most desperate people, like refugees from Dadaab to Calais, desperate for food and medical care. It's the instrumentalisation of consumer data to draw conclusions about us, with or without our consent. It's also the parallel trend of rolling back Freedom of Information laws (see: UK and United States). And, as the Panama Papers show, it is allowing transfers of public funds for private gain to be obscured.

That is the real "campaign against privacy" - not public interest journalism.

As our friend and partner Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society in India states succinctly, the right to privacy should "be inversely proportionate to power and almost conversely the requirement of transparency to be directly proportionate to power."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/big-news-network-april-6-2016-claire-lauterbach-panama-papers-and-question-of-privacy

The noose tightens on freedom of speech on the Internet

praskrishna — 2015-03-27T01:06:52Z

A WORRYING trend has emerged in the last few years, where intermediaries around the world are being used as chokepoints to restrict freedom of expression online, and to hold users accountable for content.

The blog post by Gabey Goh was published by Digital News Asia on March 26, 2015. Jyoti Panday gave her inputs.

“All communication across the Internet is facilitated by intermediaries: Service providers, social networks, search engines, and more,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior global policy analyst Jeremy Malcolm.

“These services are all routinely asked to take down content, and their policies for responding are often muddled, heavy-handed, or inconsistent.

“That results in censorship and the limiting of people’s rights,” he told Digital News Asia (DNA) on the sidelines of RightsCon, an Internet and human rights conference hosted in Manila from March 24-25.

This year, the government of France is moving to implement regulation that makes Internet operators ‘accomplices’ of hate-speech offences if they host extremist messages.

In February, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) urged ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to ensure that domain name registries and registrars “investigate copyright abuse complaints and respond appropriately.”

Closer to home, the Malaysian Government passed a controversial amendment to the Evidence Act 1950 – Section 114A – back in 2012.

Under Section 114A, an Internet user is deemed the publisher of any online content unless proven otherwise. The new legislation also makes individuals and those who administer, operate or provide spaces for online community forums, blogging and hosting services, liable for content published through their services.

Due to the potential negative impact on freedom of expression, a roadmap called the Manila Principles on Internet Liability was launched during RightsCon.

The EFF, Centre for Internet Society India, Article 19, and other global partners unveiled the principles, whose framework outlines clear, fair requirements for content removal requests and details how to minimise the damage a takedown can do.

For example, if content is restricted because it’s unlawful in one country or region, then the scope of the restriction should be geographically limited as well.

The principles also urge adoption of laws shielding intermediaries from liability for third-party content, which encourages the creation of platforms that allow for online discussion and debate about controversial issues.

“Our goal is to protect everyone’s freedom of expression with a framework of safeguards and best practices for responding to requests for content removal,” said Malcolm.

Jyoti Panday from the Centre for Internet and Society India noted that people ask for expression to be removed from the Internet for various reasons, good and bad, claiming the authority of myriad local and national laws.

“It’s easy for important, lawful content to get caught in the crossfire. We hope these principles empower everyone – from governments and intermediaries, to the public – to fight back when online expression is censored,” she said.

The Manila Principles can be summarised in six key points:

Intermediaries should be shielded by law from liability for third-party content.

Content must not be required to be restricted without an order by a judicial authority.

Requests for restrictions of content must be clear, be unambiguous, and follow due process.

Laws and content restriction orders and practices must comply with the tests of necessity and proportionality.

Laws and content restriction policies and practices must respect due process.

Transparency and accountability must be built in to laws and content restriction policies and practices.

“Right now, different countries have differing levels of protection when it comes to intermediary liability, and we’re saying that there should be expansive protection across all content,” said Malcolm (pic).

“In addition, there is no logic in distinguishing between intellectual property (IP) and other forms of content as in the case in the United States for example, where under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, intermediaries are not liable for third party content but that doesn’t apply to IP,” he added.

The Manila Principles have two main targets: Governments and intermediaries themselves. The coalition, led by EFF, will be approaching governments to present the document and discuss the recommendations on how best to establish an intermediary liability regime.

This includes immunising intermediaries from liability and requiring a court order before any content can be taken down.

With intermediaries, the list includes companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, to discuss establishing transparency, responsibility and accountability in any actions taken.

“We recognise that a lot of the time, intermediaries are not waiting for a court order before taking down content, and we’re telling them to avoid removing content unless there is a sufficiently good reason and users have been notified and presented that reason,” said Malcolm.

The overall aim with the Manila Principles is to influence policy changes for the better.

Malcolm pointed out that by coincidence, some encouraging developments have taken place in India. On the same day the principles were released, the Indian Supreme Court struck down the notorious Section 66A of the country’s Information Technology Act.

Since 2009, the law had allowed both criminal charges against users and the removal of content by intermediaries based on vague allegations that the content was “grossly offensive or has menacing character,” or that false information was posted “for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will.”

Calling it a “landmark decision”, Malcolm noted that the case shows why the establishment and promotion of the Manila Principles are important.

“Not only is the potential overreach of this provision obvious on its face, but it was, in practice, misused to quell legitimate discussion online, including in the case of the plaintiffs in that case – two young women, one of whom made an innocuous Facebook post mildly critical of government officials, and the other who ‘liked’ it,” he said.

The court however, upheld section 69A of the Act, which allows the Government to block online content; and Section 79(3), which makes intermediaries such as YouTube or Facebook liable for not complying with government orders for censorship of content.

Gabey Goh reports from RightsCon in Manila at the kind invitation of the South-East Asian Press Alliance or Seapa.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/digital-news-asia-gabey-goh-march-26-2015-noose-tightens-on-freedom-of-speech-on-internet

The Niira Radia Tapes: Scrutinizing the Snoopers

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:29:21Z

There’s been plenty of outrage in India over taped phone calls between corporate lobbyist Niira Radia and local journalists, revealing what some people believe is evidence that star reporters at the country’s newspapers and TV channels are too cozy with the subjects they’re supposed to be reporting on.

Amid that firestorm, though, there’s been much less scrutiny of why and how the wiretaps happened in the first place, whether they were justified or a governmental overreach, and how these infamous tapes got from the government into the hands of media companies.

Here are just a few questions that merit more consideration: Who orders telephone surveillance in India and on what grounds? How often is it done? What protections are in place to ensure government officials don’t abuse their surveillance authority to settle scores with journalists, corporate officials or ordinary citizens they have a beef with?

The quick answer to all of these: India trusts its bureaucrats to do the right thing. The central government’s Home Secretary, along with some intelligence agencies and state officials, has the authority to approve wiretaps. Unlike in the U.S. and other countries, where investigators must generally obtain court warrants for surveillance to pursue matters ranging from drug-trafficking to insider trading, in India there is no such legal tradition or rule.

“There is no oversight infrastructure, either in parliament or in the judiciary,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society. There is only “post facto” protection in the sense that you can sue the government later if you feel you were wrongly wiretapped, he said.

According to local media reports, industrial giant Ratan Tata on Monday petitioned the Supreme Court over the leaking of the tapes, on which he is heard bantering with Ms. Radia (his lobbyist) about a range of topics related to the $70 billion Tata Group. The reports say he feels the episode violated his privacy and wants the leakers to be punished. (While there’s no explicit constitutional protection of privacy in India, the Supreme Court in some cases has held it is covered by Article 21 of the Constitution, which says, “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.”)

A report in the Economic Times Monday said government is going to investigate the leak. A Home Ministry spokesman declined to comment on whether an inquiry has been launched but said India’s system of allowing a handful of security and intelligence officials to approve or deny wiretaps sufficiently guards Indian citizens’ privacy. “It isn’t an unchecked kind of thing, that anyone can just do it,” the spokesman said.

India draws its wiretap authority from a few laws, including the 1885 Telegraph Act and a separate information technology law enacted in 2000 and amended in 2008. The government can tap phones or intercept emails for reasons such as “any public emergency” or “in the interest of the public safety” – pretty broad language that gives a lot of leeway to bureaucrats, critics say.

A report in the Hindu last week claimed that more than 5,000 Indian phones are being bugged daily, citing anonymous sources. Mr. Abraham, of the Center for Internet and Society, says that breadth of surveillance in a country of 1.2 billion people wouldn’t be unreasonable. But his organization is planning a Right to Information request to find out more about the scope of government wiretapping.

The government may have had good reasons to conduct the wiretaps of Ms. Radia, which local media reports say were done by the income tax department for two four-month stints in 2008 and 2009, during which time they reportedly logged 5,851 calls.

The income tax agency hasn’t stated publicly what the rationale was and its officials declined to comment Monday.

Media reports suggest that the material was supposed to help probe the irregular allocation of mobile phone spectrum in 2008 to several Indian telecom firms. (The official in charge of that allocation, A. Raja, resigned as telecom minister Nov. 14 amid charges that he rigged the process to favor some companies over others.)

But much of the content in the several hours of so-called “2G tapes” that have leaked to Indian news organizations has little or nothing to do with taxes or 2G spectrum. There’s talk of the billionaire Ambani brothers’ natural gas pricing dispute, mining policy, a dog who is named Google because he is good at finding things, which corporate honchos are easy to get on the phone, and plenty of titillating exchanges between New Delhi’s power brokers on the politics of cabinet appointments. Some pretty top-notch gossip, in other words.

To be sure, the content on the tapes does raise disturbing and serious questions about whether some elements of the Indian media carry water for particular government ministers or corporations. And it pulls the veil back on how the titans of Indian business and politics shape policy away from the public spotlight, as Siddharth Varadarajan explained in Monday’s edition of the Hindu when he made a clever analogy to the movie The Matrix. (We’ve separately parsed the contents of some of the tapes for their potential significance.)

But it’s still worth asking tough questions about the legal and ethical foundations of wiretapping citizens, because, as Indian civil liberties expert Lawrence Liang said in an email, “if this can happen to a Nira Radia, then it can easily be used for a Nida Nobody.”

Update, 5:09 p.m.: “A Home Ministry spokesman confirmed the ministry has asked the Intelligence Bureau and Central Board of Direct Taxes to conduct a probe into the leak.”

Read the original in Wall Street Journal

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/niira-radia-tapes

The new tattler in town

praskrishna — 2015-09-26T16:31:00Z

WhatsApp messages, and in particular ‘admins’ of WhatsApp groups come under pressure as rumour-mongering catches the attention of the police.

The article by P. Anima was published in the Hindu Businessline on August 28, 2015. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

In early August, Solapur in southeast Maharashtra was gripped by a strange fear. Like most small towns, Solapur rarely makes the headlines except when drought deepens. That changed as alarmed villagers in almost all of the district’s 11 tehsils camped outdoors day and night, on the look out for an unseen enemy. “In the bastis (villages), residents kept night vigils, sitting around a fire,” Deepak Homkar, a local journalist, recalls. Rumours were flying thick — of theft, widespread looting and possible kidnapping of children. And all of it over WhatsApp, the instant messaging app. Similar scenes were reported from Ahmedabad a month earlier. Rumours of dacoity and terrorist attacks spread panic in areas around Ahmedabad. Arrests were made of those who had allegedly sent fear-mongering texts, but the damage had already been done.

With over 800 million, and growing, active users worldwide, WhatsApp is popular among the 160 million smartphone users in India too. Neatly slotting lives into groups of friends, work and family, it allows users to flit in and out of interactions. But a fair amount of trouble-making is also springing up from the app.

In Solapur, the police tasked with putting the rumours to an end had visited bastis, narrowed down the suspected smartphone users and randomly checked their WhatsApp messages. “We found these rumours on some, not other [phones],” says a police official. After 36 hours of search, 16 young men were held under IPC 505 1(B) for spreading alarm and fear in Pandharpur tehsil alone. It included those who allegedly sent the message and several ‘admins’ (those who open and manage the group accounts). After being questioned and warned against repeating such texts, the men were let off.

The complicity of the WhatsApp admin, whether as a passive onlooker or whether they forwarded the messages themselves, remains hazy. “It is possible that some admins may have forwarded the text, but I spoke to at least one who was held only because he managed the group,” says Homkar.

Are the admins culpable in such situations? “Not at all,” say internet experts, if the admin has had nothing to do with the fear-mongering texts. But if the admin has forwarded a potentially harmful message, he/she is accountable like anyone else. “It is then an act done knowingly,” says Prasanth Sugathan, counsel at the Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Centre. “The act of forwarding makes you accountable. The burden of truth is on you,” he adds. Chinmayi Arun, research director at Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi, pitches in, “Just being an inactive administrator of a large group, who may not be able to vet all of its content, is very different from forwarding rumours. People who forward rumours should be responsible enough to at least highlight their doubtful veracity.”

However, if the admin is unconnected to the group activities, he cannot be held for merely starting the group, they say. “Unless, of course, you have started it for an illegal activity or to cause an offence,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based The Centre for Internet and Society. The WhatsApp admin, they point out, is a mere intermediary. One who isn’t vested with any power, except to add or remove members from the group.

Twenty-three-year-old Hrishikesh, from Dhanbad, is currently admin in six groups. In three, he is one among multiple admins. He hardly keeps tab on the goings-on in this space and is not acquainted with all members, he says. “A WhatsApp admin has no control, no facility to moderate or tweak a message,” says Sugathan. Abraham trots out Section 79 of the IT Act. “It gives the admin immunity from liability that emerges from content posted by the members,” he says. The best way to track the original senders in such cases, he says, is to rope in the help of the telecom department, the other intermediary (in the case of WhatsApp, the owner Facebook) and blend it with some ‘old-fashioned’ detective work.

“Counter bad speech with good speech,” says Abraham, and that is often the best way to deal with rumour-mongering. Instances like those at Solapur and Ahmedabad have been rare, he reasons. “Such stuff can be dealt better with education rather than regulation. All types of nuisance shouldn’t be regulated. The cost of implementing new laws and training police personnel for it is not cheap. In these cases, SMSes from the police could go to every single mobile user in the district, telling them the rumours are false.”

Sugathan concurs with this. Facebook, radio and other mass media should be used by the police to quell rumours, he says. He points out that in the aftermath of the 2011 London riots, although social media was blamed for aggravating the situation, there were ample warnings against shutting it down during such times. “Blocking the medium is blocking an avenue for information. One cannot arrest each and every person. So educating people works better,” says Sugathan. Some like Abraham consider these hiccups inevitable in our evolving use of social media. A new technology is often considered sacrosanct and reliable. “From repeated exposure emerges critical understanding. It will take us another five years to know that Wikipedia is not the source of truth.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hindu-businessline-august-28-p-anima-the-new-tattler-in-town

The new Internet watchdogs

praskrishna — 2012-06-17T08:18:15Z

The Government has taken a series of measures to control the Internet, but should it be doing so? This article by Ronendra Singh was published in the Hindu Business Line on June 12, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

In March 2011, the Indian Government banned several Web sites like Typepad, Mobango and Clickatell without warning. The ban had created a hue and cry amongst netizens, some even comparing Indian authorities to the Chinese iron wall.

But despite these protests, on December 5, 2011 the Government had several social media sites and internet companies, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo “prescreen user content from India and remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online”.

The next day, the Communication and Information Technology minister Kapil Sibal held a press conference to explain his action. “We have to take care of the sensibilities of our people,” Mr Sibal told reporters during the press conference on the lawn at his bungalow in New Delhi. “Cultural ethos is very important to us,” he said.

Since then top officials from the Indian units of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook have had several meetings with Sibal. In one of the meetings, the Telecom Minister asked these companies to use humans to screen content, not technology.

Proposed rules

Amidst all this, the Government quietly moved a proposal in October 2011 that, if implemented, will have major ramifications on use of the Internet not just in India but across the world. India has moved a UN resolution seeking the creation of a 50-nation super body to regulate the Internet. India has argued for a radical shift from the present model of multi-stakeholder led decision-making, to a purely Government-run multilateral body.

In addition to this, the Communications Ministry headed by Sibal has notified new Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011 giving various guidelines to be observed by all internet related companies. The rules give sweeping powers to the Government to blank out “messages or communication of any information which is grossly offensive or menacing in nature.” The new rules do not, however, define what is offensive or menacing. Bloggers and netizens are worried that this may be used by the Government to pull down websites and articles critical of the Government. The fact that all this has come about around the time when the Anna Hazare campaigners have used the Internet to drum up support only raises more doubts over the Government's real intention.

Worrying moves

According to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director at the internet advocacy firm Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), all Governments across the world have reserved to themselves the right to block or take-down Internet services completely or specific content on specific services such as a page on a website.

But at the moment, the Indian Government is not following the letter of the law and bypassing judicial safeguards in its crackdown on political speech.

“This aggressive enforcement is also having a chilling effect on access to knowledge and freedom of expression,” Abraham told The Hindu Business Line.

Therefore the Government's sudden move to push the UN resolution without consulting stakeholders has taken many by surprise. There was some limited consultation but it definitely did not meet the current standards of multi-stakeholders being developed at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and existing institutions focused on Internet governance.

Member of Parliament Rajeev Chandrasekhar has also written a letter to the Prime Minister recently saying India's refusal to withdraw its UN statement was disappointing. The worry is that countries with dubious records on human rights and democracy have publicly aligned their positions to that of India.

“Contrary to India's statement in the UN (October 2011) and at World Summit on the Information Society (May 2012), India's proposal for Inter-Governmental oversight of Internet is against the letter and spirit of the Tunis Agenda, 2005,” Chandrasekhar wrote in the letter.

The Tunis Agenda in 2005 – far from supporting a 50-member, Inter-Governmental body manned by bureaucrats/ politicians, neither envisages a separate entity nor a superior role for Governments in the governance of the Internet.

“In sharp contrast to the ‘mandate enshrined' in the Tunis Agenda, if India's proposal is accepted, civil society, academia, engineers, private sector and international organisations by design will be regulated to the fingers of an advisory role,” the Member of Parliament said.

Government officials are tight-lipped and did not reply to questions sent by The Hindu Business Line via email.

Read the original here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-new-internet-watchdogs

The net is taking over

praskrishna — 2014-02-04T05:57:16Z

For many days to come, people will speculate what caused Sunanda Pushkar's death last week in a New Delhi hotel. Did Union minister Shashi Tharoor's wife die of poisoning or a drug overdose? Wasn't she unwell? Was it suicide? Or was it murder? No less a matter of speculation has been the social media's role in the whole affair.

The article by Veenu Sandhu and Surabhi Agarwal published in the Business Standard on January 24, 2014 quotes Sunil Abraham.

Writer Suketu Mehta has called it "murder by Twitter". Pushkar's very public spat with Mehr Tarar, a Pakistani journalist, on the micro-blogging site, many psychologists feel, may have multiplied her anguish. Apart from other things, Tarar had tweeted: "The blonde's aqal is weaker thn (sic) her grammar & spellings." Still others believe Pushkar had the premonition that end was near, and it was there for all to see on social media. "Hasta hua jayega," (will go laughing), she had tweeted a few days before her death.

Social media is no longer time-pass in the country, certainly not with over 90 million users. The line that divides online and offline lives has blurred. Networking sites have begun to impact human behaviour. Lives are being lived in the open: open to comment, analysis and abuse. Mahesh Murthy, the founder of digital brand management firm Pinstorm, calls it the "demise of the culture of secrecy". This is the age, he says, "of diversity, of coming out in the open with sexual preferences et cetera. Social media will help slaughter sacred cows. It is a good thing to happen, except for the sacred cows." According to Murthy, the pitfalls of uncensored speech are for those "who think they can control their lives or are insecure".

But pitfalls are showing up. Some time ago, a high-profile couple from Delhi approached marriage and family counsellor Nisha Khanna. Their problem was aggravated by the wife's obsession with Facebook, to the extent that she would put out everything, including the ups and downs of her relationship with her husband, as status messages for the consumption of her social media friends and acquaintances. The husband was livid - he felt exposed. It took six months of rigorous counselling before the wife started controlling, though marginally, her social media behaviour. "We are seeing obsession, irrationality and an inability to spot the very thick line that divides the private from the public," says Varkha Chulani, clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and consultant with Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai. People, she adds, are looking for Facebook 'like' buttons even in real life.

Feelings of extreme happiness, depression, loneliness and even suicidal thoughts are being shared not with family and friends but with Facebook 'connections' and Twitter 'followers'. Tweets or status updates that point to suicidal tendencies, in particular, can be telling. Some of these key expressions are "depressed", "feeling abused", "it's over" or "empty inside". A study - Tracking Suicide Risk Factors through Twitter - conducted in the US last year found a strong correlation between the number of tweets that indicated suicidal intentions and the number of suicides committed.

Having realised that the platform is also being used as a medium to vent and express personal trauma, Facebook has, for about a year, been sending reports on profiles of people with suicide risk to Mumbai-based suicide helpline Aasra. "In the last one year, we have received 350 such email intimations concerning Indians," says Aasra Director Johnson Thomas. Aasra then mails that person to subtly and sensitively convey that there is help at hand, in case it is needed. Facebook and Twitter did not offer any comment for this article.

Decoding Social Media Slang

I am an aggregator who has left a cookie crumb trail (while writing this) for a machine algorithm to follow. So, can it point out to my boss the scoops and their origin? In all probability, yes. For an all-devouring algorithm, no crumb, no target, is too small. Algorithms (at their core, a step-by-step method for doing a job) can sound scary, but social media analysts depend on these little-understood, obscure mathematical creatures.

So, information posted publicly on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites are fair game for these data predators. Suppose you click ‘like’ on Facebook, you’re giving away a lot more than you might think. Your ‘likes’ can be pieced together to form an eerily true portrait of yourself. A study of 58,000 volunteers by Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell (University of Cambridge) and Thore Graepel (Microsoft Research, Cambridge) charts the chances of an accurate prediction: 67 per cent for single versus in a relationship, 73 per cent for cigarette smoking, 70 per cent for alcohol drinking, 65 per cent for drug use, 88 per cent for male homosexuality, 75 per cent for female homosexuality, and 93 per cent for gender.

Another point is not all data out there are cold facts. Far from that, most are sentiments and slang: sweet, bitter and often intimate. “Wazup homie!! howz it going!!” is a profound example. “‘Yo, homie, I'll be at my house in case you want to come kick it later” is another. How is a number cruncher such as an algorithm expected to crunch slang and emotions? But experts insist there’s a bull market in sentiments and foul language. And an emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape. The simplest algorithms here work by scanning keywords to categorise a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (‘love’ is good, ‘hate’ is bad). But a more reliable analysis requires decoding many linguistic shades of gray. For example, to get at the true intent of a statement like ‘dude, i'm like......duuuude,’ the software will have to activate several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?)

“People first thought that emotions expressed on social media were just cute and stupid,” says Sreeju Thankan who has done computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and is now working at Mango Solutions. “Now, they are recognising it as a rich vein.” But translating slang into binary code can be much tougher. “Sentiments are different from conventional facts,” says Thankan. “There is a long way for slang patrol to go.” For casual web surfers, a simpler sentiment-analysis tool, Tweetfeel, is available. It tells you the numbers of positive and negative tweets on a given topic. It also gives you their percentages. Its analysis is based not just on emoticons, but also words and phrases.

Ashish Sharma

Last October in Mumbai, a 17-year-old college student, Aishwarya Dahiwal, killed herself after her parents barred her from using Facebook. "Is Facebook so bad? I cannot stay in a home with such restrictions as I can't live without Facebook," her suicide note reportedly read. The parents were in utter shock. "Girls are more prone to putting personal and emotional messages on social networking sites," says Manju Chhabra, child counsellor who runs an organisation called Cactus Lily in Delhi. And they tend to get more affected by what people say and how they react. "And comments on this very impersonal medium which we are giving a very personal space can be very cruel."

Seema Hingorrany, a Mumbai-based psychologist, says one of her recent patients is a girl studying in Class 9. Her friend from school had uploaded a photo of herself, which got 200 'likes'. That upset the patient terribly because it reinforced her belief that she was unattractive and she became extremely upset, to the extent that her parents felt she needed counselling. Constant use of Facebook can affect one's self-esteem, if it's already low. Another of Hingorrany's patient was a 30-year-old who took to social media after he lost his job. But seeing other people's photos and updates made him increasingly jealous, and he began posting nasty comments. The recipients of his ire began "unfriending" him, which only made him more withdrawn.

Irrational behaviour can also be seen in the world of random video chat. Sites like Omegle and Chatroulette aim to bring together surfers together with the help of webcams. The promise is irresistible: an endless stream of visitors in your room. When Ashish Sharma (the author of the accompanying article) logged on, he met a gaggle of girls who giggled endlessly, a German painter who was looking for his muse and wanted him to pose in a state of undress, a Swede who danced around and asked him to sing in praise of his bottom, and a man with an iron mask. It was crude and shocking. The excessively sexual behaviour can be unsettling for an unsuspecting (and young) visitor.

There is another side to it. "Twitter posts," says an article posted on rediff.com, "have saved lives. A man lost on a ski slope in Switzerland got help when he tweeted his predicament. Another got bail from arrest as his friends discovered from a tweet that he was jailed in a foreign country." Human resource managers check out the profiles of job applicants on social media. "People might mask many judgmental things in an interview; there is a possibility that they might express it on social media," says Debdas Sen, leader of technology consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Inclusion and diversity are important for us." But job seekers have become wise to it. That's why many airbrush their social media profiles. All politically incorrect posts are removed. Friends are treated lavishly offline so that they write nice posts on Facebook pages. Some even hire professional photographers for as much as Rs 20,000 to paste good profile pictures.

But those who hire have started to see through it. Says Murthy of Pinstrip, "One can easily figure out the truthfulness of your statements by seeing what your friends are saying." One human resource manager says he pays more attention to what people post after 10 pm because "it tends to be more truthful". A senior functionary of a Gurgaon-headquartered firm says that he had hired somebody after he had found nothing suspicious on his LinkedIn profile; it was only later he found out that this person had been involved in some financial misdemeanour in his earlier job. "His LinkedIn profile had no clues, he was not on Facebook. That should have struck me," he says. Of course, the person was asked to leave.

Sunil Abraham, the executive director of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, says social media has made people forget the distinction between private, semi-private and public statements. "Speech used to be ephemeral, but Internet has given it the power it never had," he says. "Internet never forgets." The fact that traces of a communication may remain in cyberspace even after they have been deleted has prompted a legislation called the Right to Erasure by the European Union. Under the law, earlier called Right to be Forgotten, an individual can request all his data to be erased, including by third parties. India is also mulling a similar legislation under its Privacy Bill.

Those at the bottom of the social pyramid, who have little to lose, express themselves most freely on social media, while those with reputations to protect are cautious. The consequences can be serious, as the Mumbai girl who questioned the city's shutdown after Bal Thackeray's death in November 2012 on Facebook and her friend who "liked" realised: both were called in by the police. It's not surprising why even standup comedians, who can't resist taking potshots at one and all, turn extremely careful before they tweet.

So, is social media good or bad? "Social media can help," Amartya Sen said at the recent Jaipur Literature Festival, "But you must read more books".

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/business-standard-january-24-2014-veenu-sandhu-surabhi-agarwal-the-net-is-taking-over

The Nehru you don’t know

praskrishna — 2016-05-15T13:40:23Z

Even as India's first PM is scrubbed out from textbooks, his reputation is being savaged on the internet.

The article by Amulya Gopalakrishnan was published by the Times of India on May 15, 2016. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

Jawahar, the Arabic word for pearl, could not have been chosen by any Kashmiri Brahmin as a name for his child.
Jawaharlal Nehru's grandfather was Ghiasuddin Ghazi, a kotwal of the Mughals, who changed his name to Gangadhar Nehru.
Nehru was born in a brothel in Allahabad.
Nehru got a Catholic nun pregnant, and was indebted to the church for spiriting her away from India. He died of syphilis.
Amitabh Bachchan is his son.

Welcome to the virtual world of Nehru vilification. Entirely unhinged from reality, these wild stories about India's first prime minister, who laid the foundations of its democracy, are nonetheless the default on the internet. Unlike the academic challenge of changing details in textbooks, the Web is a terrain for the taking. "Anything that questions dominant historical views is going to find visibility and virality online," says digital media scholar Nishant Shah.

Crackpot stories about Nehru have circulated for decades - for instance, former RSS chief K S Sudarshan has claimed that Nehru killed Gandhi. But "these are voices that never made it to the mainstream. Now, because there is such a preponderance of them online, these rumours take on a life of their own," says Rohit Chopra, media studies professor at Santa Clara University, who works on online Hindutva. This is particularly problematic because for many people now, reality is what they can find through Google, he says.

Nehru, of course, is highest on the list of hate objects for Hindutva extremists. "After Partition, and even more after Gandhi's murder, Nehru was convinced that India must not in any circumstances become a Hindu Pakistan. He saw the RSS as dangerous because of its demonising of minorities, and repeatedly and publicly attacked it," says historian Ramachandra Guha.

And the RSS continues to attack him right back. The hegemony of his ideas, and the persistence of his bloodline are both intolerable to them. "Indira's, Rajiv's, Sanjay's, Sonia's and Rahul's mistakes (real or imagined) are retrospectively attached to Nehru," says Guha.

On YouTube, a search for Nehru throws up smear after smear. The first, declaring him "Hindustan ka sabse ayyash aadmi", was watched 40,16,640 times at last count. These stories lay bare the campaign against him — Nehru must be cast as Muslim, westernised and dissolute, to discredit him. To establish him as a philanderer, there is a patchwork of images of Nehru at innocuous moments, with Jacqueline Kennedy and Mrinalini Sarabhai, embracing his sister at the airport, lighting a woman's cigarette.

Last year, Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, caught sneaky edits to the Wikipedia entries of Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, emanating from a central government IP address. Recently, a patently fake and misspelt "historical" letter did the rounds, where Nehru supposedly described Subhas Chandra Bose as a war criminal.

The right wing has mastered the arts of seeding misinformation, says Shah. Their claims do not come from one author, but from many different users, each adding layers to the rumours. Then, he says, "It is a matter of faith through repetition, rather than truth through inquiry".

While such conspiracy theories sprout all around the world, in India, they dominate search results, says Prakash. Apart from forums that rationally disagree with Nehruvian economics, foreign policy or defence, or make credible assertions about his positions, there are voices that simply slander Nehru. "Many kinds of right-wing animosities, economic, cultural and those that are reacting to the actions of the Nehru Gandhi family, come together in this attack," observes Prakash.

These ideas have also taken root, to some extent. A startup employee unconnected to any political party recently set up a Twitter handle called Nehruvian, trying to counter such propaganda. He explains why he was stirred into action - "On a train to Lucknow, I was reading The Discovery of India, when a young man in his twenties asked me, "kyon padh rahe ho is chor ki kitaab?"

And yet, there is no way to counter motivated rumours, short of undesirable censorship. Propaganda is a legitimate activity, and any rebuttal is also likely to be confined to its own echo chamber, Shah points out. Rather, what is needed is a new digital literacy, the "capacity to sift trustworthy information, to look critically at the sources they come from", says Prakash.

As for Nehru, it may not be easy for textbook warriors of keyboard guerrillas to dislodge him. If after 52 years, there's still so much panic about his legacy, there must be something very durable about it."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/times-of-india-amulya-gopalakrishnan-may-15-2016-the-nehru-you-dont-know

The madness of software patents

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:17:11Z

India’s patent law excludes software per se, yet over a thousand patents have been granted, writes Lata Jishnu in an article published in Down to Earth.

Per se is a straightforward term meaning by or in itself. Those who use it are pretty clear what the Latin-origin term signifies. And that’s what our lawmakers must have also believed when they used it in the 2005 amendment to India’s Patent Act.

But unaccountably this particular term has turned out to be prone to misuse more than anything else in the country’s patent law, leading to a host of software patents that should never have been granted in the first place. So me have been challenged and many more are set to be opposed in the courts but what is clear is that patent examiners in India have learned nothing from the anarchy in the US where the liberal grant of patents to software programmes and business methods has resulted in the biggest logjam in the courts. Patents cripple innovation and creativity by blocking access to data format specifications—and they hurt everyone.

A scan of the current patents disputes reveals how expensive and destructive these suits are.

InNova is suing 36 of the world’s top flight computer, telecom and banking companies for violating its patent, which “covers technology used to differentiate between spam email messages and those that users actually want to receive”. The company claims its spam filter is one of the “building blocks for all email communications” but some experts say that actual spam filtering is far more sophisticated than the methods in the firm’s patent.
Oracle is suing Google because it says Google’s Android operating system infringes seven patents it owns on Java. Analysts allege that Oracle wants to assert its dominant position in the Java ecosystem.
Microsoft and Salesforce, a small competitor, were suing each other, with the Redmond behemoth claiming Salesforce used its software-as-a-service products, while Salesforce accuses Microsoft of violating its patents.
VirnetX Holding Corp, an Internet security software firm, which successfully sued Microsoft for US $200 million, is now charging several other corporations with violating patents for technology used in mobile phones, remote communication and virtual private networking.

This list is merely illustrative of the madness out there. It is precisely to avoid such anarchy that India’s law was so formulated as to exclude software and business method patents. Here is what Section 3 (k) of the Patent Act says cannot be considered inventions: a mathematical or business method or computer programme per se or algorithms. In other words, computer programmes are a kind of algorithm just as algorithms are a kind of mathematical method. One reason for this exclusion is that computer programmes are protected by copyright in India and it was not thought necessary to provide additional protection through patents.

But lawyers being what they are, have set their sharp legal brains to assay what “computer programme per se” could be made to mean—encouraged, of course, by firms keen on pat - ent protection for software applications and business methods. The result is pretty dismaying: hundreds of patents granted in recent years, setting at naught the intention of the law. The Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) offers some estimates of the number of software patents granted in India. It says around 200 software patents have been granted till date (applications have been filed since 1999), another 1,000 patents were given for inventions which use the term ‘computer’ in the abstract describing the invention.

Krithika Narayana of CIS explains that actual numbers are hard to come by because there is no category for software patents. Thus, applications may be described as either ‘computer-based’ or ‘computerised’ or ‘computer implemented’ systems. However, most software patents are concentrated in the group of patents with G06F as their classification. The figures have been culled from this category. There is more bad news. Hund reds of software patent applications are in various stages of examination, opposition and grant which have not been included in the CIS tally. How has all this come about?

Most applicants manipulate the term ‘computer programmes per se’ to obtain patents for computer programmes run in combination with hardware (even though the hardware only executes the programme and has no ingenuity of its own) or software embedded in a machine (embedded systems). Clearly, the patent office has been wrong in granting such patents.

To end this, CIS, working in tandem with Knowledge Com - mons and Software Freedom Law Centre, is set to challenge a software patent. Hopefully, it might stop the tide. Otherwise, the consequences are scary. As Richard Stallman, the guru of free software, said, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”

Read the original in Down to Earth

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/madness-software-patents

The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance: Call for Review

praskrishna — 2015-04-03T10:55:07Z

Re-thinking the Last Mile Problem research project by Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The ‘last mile’ is a communications term which has a specific Indian variant, where technology has been mapped onto developmentalist–democratic priorities which have propelled communications technologies since at least the invention of radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, the ‘last mile’ has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship. It has provided rationale for successive technological developments, and produced an assumption that the final frontier was just around the corner and that Internet technologies now carry the same burden of breaching that last major barrier to produce a techno-nation. The project has fed into many different activities in teaching, in examining processes of governance and in looking at user behaviour.

The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.

Laying out a theoretical review of the history of technologies of archiving in the country, the project aims at building case studies of public and private archives in the country and the needs for a local capacity building network of historians, archivists, technologists and state bodies which exploits the digital and Internet technologies for building new archives of Indian material.

The monograph has emerged out of the "Rethinking the Last Mile Problem" project that was initiated in September 2008. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback.Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document:

PDF
Word

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by 30 December 2010 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem

The Law and Economics of Copyright Users Rights

praskrishna — 2013-09-06T06:25:35Z

Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University Washington College of Law is organizing a conference on law and economics of copyright users at Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington DC, on September 26, 2013. Sunil Abraham will present an update on the Pervasive Technologies project as keynote at this meeting.

Click to read the original announcement published by the Washington College of Law here.

2:00	Welcome by PIJIP Director Michael Carroll
2:15	Copyright Flexibilities and Social and Economic Development: Current State of Knowledge Moderator: Walter Park, American University Department of Economics (Bio) Christian Handke, Erasmus University Rotterdam (Bio) Joost Poort, University of Amersterdam (Bio) Piotr Stryszowski, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Bio) Rokia Alavi, International Islamic University of Malaysia (C.V.)
4:00	Break
4:15	Roundtable: Copyright Users Rights in Law Reform Moderator: Sean Flynn, American University Washington College of Law Jeremy Debeer, University of Ottawa, Canada (Bio) Rebecca Giblin, Monash University, Australia (Bio) Caroline Ncube, University of Cape Town, South Africa (Bio) Alberto Cerda, Georgetown University and Universidad de Chile (Bio) Martin Senftleben, University of Amsterdam (Bio)
6:00	Break
6:15	Keynote: Sunil Abraham, Center for the Internet and Society – India (Bio) Users Rights and Innovation in the ICT Industries in India
7:00	Reception (Room 600)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/pijip-september-26-2013-the-law-and-economics-of-copyright-users-rights

The Last Word: Is there a need to review Information Technology Act?

praskrishna — 2012-11-21T12:10:15Z

Does the high-handed arrest of two young girls mean it's time to review and revise the IT Act?

Aryaman Sundaram, Pavan Duggal, Pranesh Prakash and Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad took part in a discussion with Karan Thapar on section 66A of the IT Act. This was aired on CNN-IBN on November 20, 2012.

Pranesh Prakash said that it was just not a history of misuse of section 66A of the IT Act because that presumes that the law is otherwise fine and it has just been applied wrongly. This law is fundamentally flawed. It is unconstitutional. It is like a law in which there is a provision on rape, murder, theft, nuisance, everything put together in a single section with the same punishment being given for all of them. This obviously is not good law making but that is exactly what has been done in this case by taking bits from laws in the UK and from elsewhere and mashing them all up into one omnibust gargantuan monster which is unconstitutional.

Pranesh Prakash also added that the fact is that if you have bad laws they will be used to harass people. Having good law is one part of that. Apart from that there has been also other laws which have been misapplied in this case. In all these recent cases, section 66A of the IT Act wasn't the only provision used. This particular section has been used in conjunction with some other laws. So section 66A of the IT Act independently is not required. There are other laws in the Indian Penal Code and elsewhere which are usually enough to cover all the things that section 66A of the IT Act is right now covering. It is just an add on provision that really can't justify its existence unless it is really reduced in scope.

Watch the full video that was aired on CNN-IBN

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/ibnlive-videos-november-20-2012-the-last-word-is-there-a-need-to-review-information-technology-act